Diamond Fire GL 1000 Pro
The Fire GL 1000 Pro was Diamond's premium professional 3D card in late 1997, using the 3DLabs Permedia 2 chipset.
 |
Released | August 1997 |
| Bus | AGP 1x | |
| Chipset | 3DLabs Permedia 2 (Texas Instruments TVP4020) | |
| Standards | SVGA | |
| Memory | 4 or 8 MB of SGRAM | |
| Ports | 15-pin DSUB (analog video out) VR glasses output (3-pin mini DIN on backplate) |
|
| Part # | ||
| FCC ID | - | |
| Price | - | |
| See Also | Diamond FireGL 1000 |
The Diamond FireGL 1000 Pro was the company's first foray into using the AGP 1x bus, and it fully supported its benefits, including sideband addressing
The Permedia 2 chipset was a high performance 2D and 3D graphics engine, with support for both OpenGL and Direct3D APIs, MPEG2 hardware acceleration and had an onboard DMA engine. It also had a fast embedded RAMDAC that ran at 230 MHz. Later versions of the Permedia 2 saw this rise to 250 MHz, but I don't believe these (the Permedia 2V variant) were ever used on the Diamond card here.
The Fire GL 1000 Pro was not only fast, but had good texturing, bilinear and trilinear filtering, alpha blending, vertex shading, and Z-buffering, all at a 16-bit colour depth. The only 3D capabilities that let the chipset down a little were its dithering and linear mip-mapping results. 3DLabs always favoured OpenGL over DirectX, since its history was more in the professional graphics market where OpenGL had been prevalent for some time, and typically this resulted in somewhat buggy drivers for DirectX. Fortunately, Diamond had a reputation for writing their own drivers, and for the Fire 1000 GL Pro, this was no exception - solid OpenGL and DirectX drivers for this card.
The card could refresh the screen at 120 Hz when run at 1024 x 768, 100 Hz at 1280 x 1024, and 85 Hz at 1600 x 1200 resolution. When running 3D, the maximum resolution was 1280 x 1024 (16-bit colour and Z-buffer depth).
From Diamond's website at the time:
Diamond Fire GL 1000 Pro AGP - Premium 2D/3D Performance for Professional Graphics
Create dynamic 3D multimedia presentations, advanced 3D models, sophisticated web graphics or texture rich worlds with maximized power. Diamond Multimedia's Fire GL 1000 Pro is the premier graphics accelerator that delivers professional quality 2D/3D performance for power-hungry applications. Based on the next-generation 3Dlabs Permedia 2 graphics chip and rendering engine, Fire GL 1000 Pro introduces dramatic new graphics performance and productivity for Windows NT® and Windows 95®.
- Accelerates Your Windows NT Applications
- Experience Professional Quality 3D in Real-time
- Delivers Superior 2D Productivity
- Design with Maximized Power
- Outstanding Windows NT Acceleration
- Superior 2D/3D for Graphics Intensive Applications
- Advanced tools for CAD/CAM and Digital Content Creation
- Optimized OpenGL, Direct 3D and HEIDI® Acceleration
- Excellent Windows 95 Performance
- Includes valuable software
- COSMO Software's COSMO Player 2.0 (U.S. full retail Fire GL 1000 Pro only)
- Caligari Truespace3 SE (U.S. full retail Fire GL 1000 Pro only)
- Crystal Graphics' 3D Impact: 3D Fonts and Animation (U.S. full retail Fire GL 1000 Pro only)
- Diamond's AutoCAD 2D & 3D Productivity Utilities: Big Focus & 3D Win
- Maximized acceleration for OpenGL, Direct 3D, and Heidi.
- High performance graphics based on 3Dlabs' next-generation Permedia2 chipset
- Conquers the sluggish 3D performance with the integrated 100 MFLOPS GLINT Delta geometry setup processor
- Hardware accelerated features including rasterization, texture mapping, double buffering, and 16-bit Z-buffering
- True color 3D resolutions up to 1024x768 double buffered with 16-bit Z-buffer
- Real-time processing up to 1 million texture mapped polygons per second
- 83 million textured mapped pixels/sec (perspective corrected, bilinear filtered)
- 42 million texture mapped Z-buffered pixels/sec (perspective corrected, bilinear filtere
- Fast screen display with 8 MB of 100 MHz SGRAM
- Maximize productivity with large monitor support up to 1980x1080 in high color
- Excellent performance in true color up to 1600x1200
- High screen refresh rates based on an integrated 230MHz RAMDAC
- DVD upgradeable for cinema-quality video on your PC
Controller:
|
Connectors:
|
Board Revisions
The only board revisions I have seen for the Diamond Fire GL 1000 Pro are Rev.A for the AGP variant and Rev.C for the PCI variant.
Competition
Lots of graphics card manufacturers made use of the same 3DLabs GPU in 1997, including Hercules with their Dynamite 3D/GL and STB Systems' Twister. Despite the GL Pro not being targeted at the PC gaming market, that is where it was mostly seen. If comparing one of these against other cards of similar era, these Permedia 2-based cards can be considered to have gone head to head with the likes of the Matrox Millennium II, nVidia RiVA 128-based cards, and Number Nine Revolution 3D. The top-performing chipsets were the RiVA 128 (which also produced better 3D picture quality) and the Fire 1000 GL, though in some benchmarks, such as at TrueColor colour depths, the Revolution 3D's Ticket to Ride chipset came out on top.
Overall, the Diamond Fire GL 1000 Pro card benchmarked very well, though reviewers at the time cautioned that a high-end CPU was needed to get the most out of it.
In the Media
Setting it Up
I have no setup information for the Fire GL series.
Downloads
Operation Manual Get in touch if you can provide this missing item! |
Original Utility Disk Get in touch if you can provide this missing item! |
|
More Pictures
A PCI variant of the Diamond Fire GL 1000 Pro (1997), courtesy of DOS Days' contributor, targeted